PCGamingWiki will use a Single Sign On (SSO) system to bridge wiki and forum accounts which is ready for testing. You may login using the 'Login with PCGamingWiki' button on both the wiki and the forum, which will soon be the only option. If you have any issues please message Andytizer on Discord.

Valve says the Interactive Recommender uses a "neural-network model that is trained to recommend games based on a user's playtime history, along with other salient data." The data is modified by two sliders that users can edit: one ranges from "popular" to "niche," while the other slider ranges from "older" to "newer" games.

Rather than base recommendations around genre or category, the Interactive Recommender instead scans through Valve's data sets to find other Steam users with similar tastes. The model then recommends titles the user might enjoy based on other games played by like-minded Steam users.

Valve also says they discard most category information about the game when entering it into their model.

"We don't explicitly feed our model information about the games. Instead, the model learns about the games for itself during the training process. In fact, the only information about a game that gets explicitly fed into the process is the release date, enabling us to do time-windowing for the release-date slider. It turns out that using release date as part of the model training process yields better quality results than simply applying it as filter on the output," Valve said. They also discard information about review scores and tags, relying only on popularity and age variables.

Users worried about this experimental technology replacing their regular Steam recommendations have nothing to fear for the time being. Rather, Valve says users who want to try the Recommender will have to specifically choose it under the Steam Labs experiments section. Regular Steam recommendations will still function as before.

Since their algorithm discards the categories most other game recommendation algorithms operate by, Valve also claims that developers won't have to worry about optimizing their game description to make it more likely to be recommended.

"The best way for a developer to optimize for this model is to make a game that people enjoy playing. While it's important to supply users with useful information about your game on its store page, you shouldn't agonize about whether tags or other metadata will affect how a recommendations model sees your game," Valve said.

Sign in

Similar Content

The Steam version of FlatOut is the v1.0 version. This is the v1.1 patch for FlatOut that works with the Steam release. GOG is already patched to v1.1, and does not need this patch.
Originally posted by Clya900, the patch was missing 2 files are now included in this download, patch1.bfs, and patch.ini. Without these files, the game would fail to load, and shows a Runtime error. The game now has been tested on the Steam version, and works perfectly fine.

As reported earlier this week by Bleeping Computer, ArsTechnica and other sources, a security researcher found a vulnerability that allows to gain full access to the target computer through elevated privileges, which could be exploited by malicious game creators. According to the articles and included researcher statements, Valve have rejected two researchers' attempts to get rewarded for reporting the issue through the HackerOne platform on the basis of being out of scope and allegedly requiring physical access to the device.
The researches decided to go public as the result.
Since then, Valve appear to have patched the Steam client but only in the beta as of today.
Update: On August 13, the main client was also updated to patch the vulnerability.
Update 2: Bypassing the fix is possible.

Classic games The Lion King (1994) and Disney's Aladdin (1993) have been delisted from Steam without so much as a word.
Thankfully GOG.com have given a short warning of just over 24 hours in this forum post announcement :
Another Disney game, The Jungle Book, has been delisted from Steam but still available from GOG.com - who knows if more Disney games will be delisted in the future?

DuckTales Remastered is going be removed from all digital storefronts including Steam on August 8th, according to this official tweet from Capcom USA:
This gives us barely over one day's notice to quickly snap up this game for the last time on Steam. Luckily Steam keys should continue to be available on official resellers like Gamesplanet where it is conveniently on a 75% flash sale. Make sure to buy a piece of history before they run out of keys!